And I’ll say this again next week, you will hear me say it, but she’s been tested by scientists and they’ve done quintuple-blind studies on her ability to bring through information from people who have passed away. And she’s also incredibly grounded, incredibly smart. She’s a high school English teacher who loves science and loves logic and loves to be grounded. So I’m kind of buzzing from that.

And it reminds me a little bit of another guest I had on, in the not too distant past, by the name of Dr. Lisa Miller, who is a brilliant psychologist from Columbia University—so, top-ranked university. And she is so gutsy and so brave because she actually does research on spirituality and the role of spirituality in people’s lives. And on the podcast here, she said flat out, “Take your pick: spirituality or depression. Those are your options.”

And I was thinking, talking to Laura Lynne, what if—you know, people go to grief counseling after their loved ones have passed. I have a wonderful, wonderful coach from South Africa who went to a grief coach after she lost a baby. She had a miscarriage. And she was sitting with this therapist who was trying to get her to just deal with the fact that this was gone, just rationally deal with it. And she said, “Imagine in your mind a ribbon extending between your heart and the heart of the baby you hoped to have that is not now going to be born alive, and just take a pair of scissors and cut that ribbon and set yourself free.” And she said, “That just made me want to throw up in all my parts.” 

And she said, “I went home and I thought about a thousand ribbons connecting me to that baby and I will never cut them. And that’s when I healed.” And I thought if it is real—and there is so much evidence that it’s real, that consciousness survives death and that love never goes out, like alive is eternal. And we’re going through all this grief counseling and trying to make our lives work with the rational knowledge that death is the end. If that’s not true, how is it healing us to spend all this time convincing ourselves that it’s true? If it’s not true, it can’t bring us to peace to think that yes, we’re going to cut all those ribbons with everybody we loved who’s gone not just through death, but geography. You can’t get in touch with them again. Cut the ribbons, cut the ties. It doesn’t work.

Anyway, I’m talking to Laura Lynne about her experience as one of the best known, most deeply tested psychic mediums around and her big…you’ve got to tune in next week because she firmly believes that everyone has these skills and that it’s like a muscle: if you work it, it gets stronger. And she was talking about asking, I said, “How do we develop it, those of us who weren’t just born seeing dead people everywhere?” She said, “Well, here’s the thing. You’ve got to learn that you can co-create a language of the mystery with spiritual beings, with guides if you want, with people who’ve passed on, if you believe in God, whatever you want to call it, create a language to go with it.”

And this fascinated me because it means introducing to the left side of the brain, which is not the mystical side, a language to incorporate the experiences of the mystery that happen in parts of the brain that are not verbal. And so we were talking about this and I said, “Well, how do you do this? How do you co-create a language?” So she started talking about a sort of directory of your own signs and symbols, which is fascinating to me because last month in the Wilder community— there are a lot of people here from the online community that my partner Ro and I run together. It’s called Wilder and we have monthly themes. And last month the theme was signs and symbols. So we spent the whole month talking about people’s lexicons of symbology that they’ve created in their own lives. And one of the things Laura said is the more you talk about these things in a grounded, rational way with people that you really enjoy without going off the deep end, the more they happen.

And I said, “So how do you co-create this language?” And she said, “Well, the first thing you want to do is think of something that’s sort of meaningful to you and then ask whatever’s out there, ‘Please send me a sign’ and then write it down so that you remember it. and be open to the sign.” And I said, “Well, so what do you ask for?” And she said, “Well, you can ask for a really unusual symbol.” If you ask for an elephant, don’t just say, “I want to see an elephant.” Make the elephant purple. Or “I want to see a giraffe on fire” or something. Not a giraffe that’s actually on fire. I was just thinking of a giraffe in a fire truck is I think what she said, not a giraffe on fire.

Anyway, she said, “Make it specific. Write it down. Or you could think of a numeric sequence that you want to see or a phrase.” And as she’s saying that, Ro, my fabulous wonderful partner, one of my fabulous, wonderful partners who’s sitting in the room with me, she was sitting there during my interview with Laura and at a certain point she just kind of jumped up and looked very alarmed and I thought I’d done something wrong.

No, what happened was that she was listening and she said, “Okay, think of a phrase, think of a phrase.” And she just thought randomly about this phrase from, this saying from Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “To thine own self be true.” So she thought, okay, she didn’t write it down, but it was very clear in her mind. And the reason she jumped up off the couch was that five minutes later, Laura Lynne Jackson said, “For example, in Hamlet, Shakespeare has Polonius say, ‘To thine own self be true.'” This is what made Ro just like, “What?!” She actually said that.

So I was like, well, that’s pretty cool. And then Laura asked, she said, “Also any unusual words that you want to hear.” And she had mentioned the word claircognizance, which I’ve heard, but not a lot. So there’s clairvoyance, which is being able to see things that are super natural. Clairaudience is hearing it, clairsentience is feeling it, and claircognizance is when you just simply know something for some reason and there’s no material reason for it.

I thought, “Huh, claircognizance, that’s actually, that happens to me quite a lot, but I don’t use that word much.” Then while I was sitting here getting ready to turn on my camera for this, I thought, “I’ll go check my Substack” because I’ve only been on Substack like a month and I just love Substack. And what I wrote on Substack is not about “Let’s all be mediums or let’s all be woo-woo,” although it has to do with the mystery. Anyway, there was a new comment and it was on a post I’d written called “Two Kinds of Stuck,” which is about how you can get stuck because life is too hard for you, or you can get stuck because you’re sort of headed in the wrong direction and at some level you know it. 

And so this woman just left a post, her name is Gabriela Stid and she said, “Reading Martha Beck’s essay, I realized I’m headed somewhere I’ve never been before and it’s scary. Truth is I’ve been stuck for quite a while, reluctant to fully emerge into the spiritual world and embrace my supernatural gift of claircognizance.”

I don’t know Gabriela. The essay was not about claircognizance, but claircognizance is the word I had said I wanted to hear, and it’s bold and in italics. And literally, I just read it before I tuned into this broadcast. 

Laura also said when you start hanging out with people who are grounded and sort of mature about it and balanced and peaceful, and you’re talking about the wonders of the mystical world, the magical world, she said the signs go up a lot. You start seeing many more of them and they’re very strong.

So all I wanted to say to y’all today is just kind of a teaser for next week, but I’m already getting all these quite improbable things that have happened. Could they all be coincidence? Sure. Are they probably all coincidence? If you add all those coincidences together, if there were a way to measure the statistical probability that they were all happening by chance, I think those odds would be very, very low. 

So my message to you today is before you listen to her next week, how about you start creating your own little lexicon, like write down some things that you’d love to see, a phrase, a numerical sequence, an animal of a strange color or whatever, write it down and come back next week, and we can chat about it. No, we’ll chat about it the following week because I’m just going to talk to her for a full hour next week.

Anyway, she’s the real deal, y’all. And when I went to see her speak, the reason I invited her on was I went to see her speak somewhere and it was just really interesting. I just wanted to hear from one person and I asked for a specific sign and there was one point in her speech, she just gave a speech and then she said, “Oh, they’re telling me to say this.” She looked straight at me, and she delivered the one word I had asked to be my sign. So yeah, I’m like, she’s the real deal, I think. Let’s see if this keeps going. And in fact it does.

So I would love you all to, this week, connect with your joyful, playful side, not anything like doom and gloom. Don’t put any heavy weight on it. Get playful, get curious, and get adventurous and start just writing down signs and talking to people about them. That’s another thing she said is when you say them out loud, you teach your body that it’s all right to talk about it and think about it. And one of the things I think we’re always doing is we’re editing and censoring reality to keep out the things that don’t fit with our cultural paradigm.

And our cultural paradigm is just hammering home this idea that there is nothing but matter that can be measured, and there is absolutely nothing, and consciousness is a product of the brain, and there just is nothing out there. No matter what evidence comes from physics or from people’s experience or from social scientists doing huge studies on things like verifiable near-death experiences, we are always working to trim and hack the mystery out of our lives. What if that’s one of the reasons we’re stuck? What if one of the reasons we feel so yucky so much of the time is that there’s a whole different side to reality that is trying to come in and bring us up to a level of joy that we can’t experience within the confines of our culture?

So that’s what I have to say to you. Now we’re going to do our little Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation if y’all are still into it. I do this every time. Sometimes I wonder, “Are they sick of it?” So let me know if you’re sick of it. But for now, let’s do it because one of the ways you can open a space for all of this to happen is not to grasp or try for it, but to completely relax. And one of the best ways to do that is to do a figure-ground-reversal exercise by focusing on what is not physically measured in a tangible manner.

So let’s do our Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation. Get comfortable. Take a deep breath in and blow the air all the way out. Slowly, long exhale. Try it again. Straighten your spine if you can, get comfortable, feel whatever’s supporting your body, the floor, the bed, the chair, and ask yourself the nonsense question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

Get your eyes into soft focus and allow yourself to see the screen in front of you if you’re not driving or whatever. And ask yourself, can I imagine the distance between my eyes and the object at which I am looking? Can I imagine the distance between us? Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and the base of my spine? Can I imagine the space inside the volume of my torso? Can I imagine the 99.999-plus part of all the matter in my torso that is in fact empty space?

Can I imagine the stillness beneath every sound I can hear right now? Can I imagine switching my attention from what I can hear to the silence that holds it? Can I imagine the stillness in which all movement and action take place? Can I imagine seeing the stillness that holds the moving things and never moves itself? Can I imagine that this space, silence, and stillness are alive and conscious and filled with love and knowledge and delight? Can I imagine us all in the field of the silence, stillness, and space connecting us all on this round blue planet? Take another deep breath, let it all the way out, and let’s talk about some questions.

Okay. Someone asked: “Does she know why they—‘they’ being non-physical beings—use electrical or electronic stuff so much?”

Yeah, because from everything we can figure out and including just simply being told when you ask, it’s like humans can, we can sense a variety of vibrations, but it’s a fairly low slow, like the wavelength of matter is very slow compared to the wavelength of light, right? And the electromagnetic spectrum, that is stuff we can only see by its effects on us, right? And electricity is one of those things. So if they’re in the spectrum of electromagnetism, it’s much easier for them to influence something electronic than something like a piece of wood. And metal, in specific—Laura was talking about this, metal objects as well as electronic objects can often be the conduit of some kind of message because metal conducts electricity. So there’s a rational logic to it if you’re willing to throw your imagination open that far. But yeah, often, often I have seen myself and heard of electronic appliances and lights and things reacting profoundly when people are having strong energetic experiences or feeling the presence of someone who’s on the other side.

Okay, so y’all like the meditation just fine? Okay. 

So somebody writes this: “So help me, right now, as you were saying this, I got a sign from my sister. I picked up scissors to cut a package and you, Marty, just said something about picking up scissors.”

That’s so cool. If anybody else has any questions, are they coming in? Not many. All right. 

Oh, somebody’s writing. Somebody says: “I don’t get coins, but domes especially are—”

Do you mean dimes? Or just domes, like on buildings and stuff? One of the things that I saw happening, I was watching this with some friends and we were talking about how we had a friend who passed away and we were sitting in one room and Ro’s computer, my wife Ro, her computer was in another room and it was not only turned off, it was closed. When you close the clamshell, it’s off, right? And so we started talking about our friend who died, and she had written and recorded some songs. And as we were talking about her, that song started playing from the computer that was closed, and the computer never acted like that before or since. I have had, once when I was sitting in a car where the GPS was off and I was practicing a driving meditation so that I’d be very alert and present and a safe driver, I stopped at a stoplight and I put the car in park and just deeply, deeply went into this meditation, and the GPS was off and suddenly it went bong! “You have reached your destination.” So that was pretty cool.

Aaliyah asks, “What’s the most favorite sign you’ve ever received?”

Okay, this happened just maybe two months ago, and I don’t know if I put this online or if I just shared it with the Wilder community. I was working on a painting, a big painting. I’ve been working on it off and on for two years. I’d get it out and dabble on it. It was a weird subject matter, so it was hard for me to do. If you give me something that I can look at or photograph, I can paint it pretty quickly, but this was imagination, and I’d never seen anything like it. So I kept working on it and I felt like, “Should I even keep trying?” 

And then I asked, I literally said out loud, “I want a sign if it’s okay to keep working on this weird painting or am I just wasting my time?” Two hours later, I randomly went online and picked a near-death experience story because I love listening to those, and I turned it on and this man’s talking about how he died. He drowned in a kayaking accident. His name was Pat Johnson. And then he drowned for reals and he said he had the experience of seeing his body—he left. And then he said, “So I went through,” I don’t remember if he went through the tunnel or whatever, but then he said, “And I found myself in this scenario.” And he said, “There was a stained glass window in front of me and to the right of center and a little bit down from the top was a hole, but it was a jagged hole like somebody had thrown a rock through this stained glass window. And behind the hole was a blinding white light and it was shining into a room where there was a black marble floor and there was total velvety darkness all around it, but it was a little bit like a kaleidoscope and the light through the shards of the glass window were throwing all this light onto the floor, onto this black marble floor. And other than that, it was just really dark.”

Y’all, that is exactly what I’d been painting. Not almost, kinda. That’s exactly—the hole in that position, the black marble floor, everything. My stained glass wasn’t completely blue, his was blue, but that was the only difference. I could post this somewhere. I don’t know where. I don’t understand the interwebs. I’m busy talking to ghosts. Don’t bother me with these mundane things. And I had asked for a sign two hours earlier that it was okay to keep working on this, and it blew me away. It really did. I should post it somewhere that you can see it.

Oh, great, here are some good questions. She says: “I’m interested in the ‘claires’—the clairvoyance, claireaudience and so on. What do you think the difference is between where we feel intuition and where we receive signs?”

It’s a little bit semantic, but for me it’s if there’s an intuitive, “Ooh, I don’t think I should do that or I maybe should want to do that,” it’s a kind of pull, which is probably a kind of claircognizance. But to me, a sign is when, say I decide I’m going to go ahead and do this thing that I feel intuitively I should do, and immediately someone runs up to me and says, “I’m so glad you’re doing what you’re doing.” Or I see a huge sign that says… I mean, the same thing. When I was talking about painting stuff, I decided I wanted to paint portals and I just saw this random sign that said, “Stay portals.” An intuitive pull takes us one direction or another. A sign is something that where the universe around us and maybe our consciousness in co-creation with the consciousness of the entire universe around us says, “We’re going to deliver to your consciousness an identical image, a symbol or an image that is so meaningful to you,” and it comes from outside you where the intuition comes from inside. And when they meet, aha, that really resonates with you.

Now, if you see something, if somebody says, “I will show you a sign,” and then a big cloud of dust appears or something, and you don’t feel peaceful and joyful receiving that, that’s not a sign. People are always trying to use this concept to hoodwink people or get them to join cults or whatever. Just because someone can do a magic trick doesn’t mean it’s a sign. But if you personally have a deep relationship with something that resonates powerfully and makes you feel peaceful and joyful and calm, it will always feel peaceful and calm. It will never tell you that you have to go do something, especially something you don’t want to do. It will always be a message of love and peace, but it will also say to you, “There’s more going on here than just the material universe knocking around like billiard balls.” That’s what I think.

Question: “Do you think having a dream about someone or something is related to this idea of a sign, or is it a different phenomenon?” 

I think it’s a different phenomenon. I think that it’s working with a different level of consciousness. So the dream consciousness, we all know it’s fabricating the dream, right? I believe that in what we call waking consciousness, we’re also fabricating what we perceive. But in the dream, you’re pretty sure once you wake up that that’s what’s going on. There are dreams that the great psychologist, Carl Jung, called ‘big dreams.’ And in these dreams, something happens that is not a symbol. It’s just a message. It’s sometimes just a person who died showing up, and it feels very, very different. I remember once I was working with a client and she said, “I had a really strong dream last night and there was a kangaroo and a box of cookies or whatever.” She’s like, “And then the dream just froze and it pulled up like a screen, like it was a movie on a screen. The screen rolled up and there was just my grandmother’s face and she said, ‘Stop smoking.'” 

And I was like, “Okay, let’s deal with the symbolism of the kangaroo and the cookie and the grandmother.” She’s like, “The cookie and the kangaroo, those were symbols, but that was just my grandmother telling me to stop smoking, and I think I better stop smoking.” That’s a different level of access to some kind of information in the universe. The human brain is a fairly limited instrument. It is the most complex thing we know, but to say that it’s the most complex thing in the universe is a little bit of hubris, I think. 

We have dream consciousness, we have waking consciousness. I think they’re both very minimal compared to universal everything that could be consciousness. They’re like tools. We have paints in our palette that we can use to create pictures that look real to us. Utilize them, but don’t think they represent the mind of God. They represent the mind of whatever the force is, but filtered through the perceptions of a social primate on a little planet. And there are probably billions of planets with life forms that are more intelligent than we are. But the dream is a thing it can use.

Someone else says: “I often have dreams that come to fruition. I was wondering what your thoughts are on that, and I apologize if this is a duplicate question.”

There are daydreams that come to fruition, and there are night dreams that come to fruition. Big dreams often come to fruition when you dream them at night and it feels incredibly significant. My own personal experience is that when that happens, the dream comes true later. If it’s a daydream, it depends whether the dream is something that you’re trying to do to fit in with society. Like, “I dream that I am going to be famous and beautiful” and it’s because part of you so wants to be accepted and fit in. Eh, that may or may not come true. 

But if you say, “I dream that I can give something to the world that genuinely changes things for people in a positive way” and there’s a yearning that goes along with it, that type of a daydream is meant to come true. I really believe that. And it doesn’t mean that we don’t have to work in the real world to bring our dreams to fruition here, whether they’re night dreams, daydreams, or signs and symbols.

And one of the most fun ways to work in the physical world is to do this thing of creating a lexicon of symbols by asking for signs, writing them down, saying them out loud, seeing when they happen, and then telling people about them, which is why I’m so grateful that you came here and let me tell mine to you. 

I’m going to try to get that silly sign that I got. It wasn’t silly. It was really cool. I’m going to try to get it out there, and I really, really hope that you actually do this during this week because it will raise your joy level. It really will.

In the end, that’s kind of what we’re here for, I think, to find a way to enjoy this weird little bus ride in our little monkey bodies. Thanks for coming to The Gathering Room. I adore you all. See you very soon and have a wonderful week! Bye.